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Action potential initiation in a multi-compartmental model with cooperatively gating Na channels in the axon initial segment

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Abstract

Somatic action potentials (AP) of cortical pyramidal neurons have characteristically high onset-rapidness. The onset of the AP waveform is an indirect measure for the ability of a neuron to respond to temporally fast-changing stimuli. Theoretical studies on the pyramidal neuron response usually involves a canonical Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) type ion channel gating model, which assumes statistically independent gating of each individual channel. However, cooperative activity of ion channels are observed for various cell types, meaning that the activity (e.g. opening) of one channel triggers the activity (e.g. opening) of a certain fraction of its neighbors and hence, these groups of channels behave as a unit. In this study, we describe a multi-compartmental conductance-based model with cooperatively gating voltage-gated Na channels in the axon initial segment. Our model successfully reproduced the somatic sharp AP onsets of cortical pyramidal neurons. The onset latencies from the initiation site to the soma and the conduction velocities were also in agreement with the previous experimental studies.

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Acknowledgments

We thank A. Neef, M. Monteforte, W.Wei and M. Gutnick for fruitful discussions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Üsküdar University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Pinar Öz

  2. State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Min Huang

  3. Theoretical Neurophysics Group, Max Planck Institute for Self-Organization and Dynamics, Göttingen, Germany

    Fred Wolf

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  1. Pinar Öz
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  2. Min Huang
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Correspondence to Pinar Öz.

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Action Editor: Alain Destexhe

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Öz, P., Huang, M. & Wolf, F. Action potential initiation in a multi-compartmental model with cooperatively gating Na channels in the axon initial segment. J Comput Neurosci 39, 63–75 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-015-0561-9

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